The Brigadoon newsgroup. alt.brigadoon appears at irregular intervals, full of articles dating from 1970. "Too muchh cllicking, tha kiy for tha lattar aftar 'd' is brokin. What isthis program?" (Freaky Twlight Zone theme).

Consider Oz after the elections. The Wicked Witch being cast as a private property owner attacked by government regulators, out to rob the rich to pay for outrageous spiralling public health care costs. Hearts, brains, and courage transplants for homeless nomads! In the new Oz, these beggars would be told to get jobs. Perhaps they should apply for employment the Wicked Witch Beltway Bandit Corporation, where funding for the new generation of Winged Monkeys has led to a jobs boom. Meanwhile, the Yellow Brick Road maintenance was relegated to the individual Oz quadrants, and sections have fallen into disrepair. Dorothy, arriving today, would be told to click her illegal immigrant shoes together and Go Back Where She Came From. Returning to Kansas, she would find Aunt Em in trying to figure out FEMA forms in the wreckage of the farmhouse.

University area business directory entry: Pissov Pizza, formerly Cluck-U Chicken.

Colleges that I get confused with each other: Rice, Cornell, Wheaton.

Will Shoemaker-Levy destroy the dinosaurs on Jupiter?

Will Jupiter be declared a solar system disaster area? Will we be taxed?

Cats used to be able to talk, but they got tired of it. If you read newsgroups long enough you'll understand.

Men and women live in different universes. In the women's universe, cars have no internal parts, only strange noises. In the men's universe, there are no vacuum cleaners. You can see for yourself. Put a vacuum cleaner in the middle of a room, where people are likely to trip over it. No man will ever see it. They may appear to step over it, but they are really passing through it without interaction.

A computer environment is like being in a very sophisticated kitchen, one where there's a gadget for everything. There are innumerable drawers and cabinets, and a completely mad cook arranged everything. You could starve trying to find the can opener.

Why is nothing ever the size of a hailstone?

If it's so cost effective to buy out homeowners in flood areas, why isn't it a good idea to buy out public housing residents? Which is the worst disaster area?

The Russians used to have great interest in preserving dead bodies, starting with Lenin and continuing on with breakthroughs that allowed obviously dead bodies to be used in animations, viz Brezhnev and Andropov. The US successfully copied this during the Reagan era.

Cats invented people for the purpose of operating refrigerators.

Fermat's last theorem was neither Fermat's, his last, nor a theorem. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Photon pairs consitute a separate point universe moving through our own. At the moment of detection in our universe, the mini-universe experiences a "big bang", giving birth to two photons moving along a line in our univers. How do they know to come back to our universe instead of somewhere else?

If hailstones were the size of body parts, like eyeballs, brains, and pituitaries, they wouldn't be mentioned on the news so often.

The News: Joe hasn't got a clue and Nancy can't control the VOLume of her V*O*I*C*E, and neither one of them can find the camera.

The next eclipse like the last one (annular? partial?) won't be seen again (here? in the continental US?) until the year 2070, 2071, 2017, or 2012. Watch Channel 4 News for all your scientific news.

What comes after Tera?

Astronomers have announced the detection of glycine in interstellar reaches and say that this has profound implications about the origins of life. The cosmic voids are not empty, but have, on their own immense scale, collections of chemicals that resemble the primordial soup. More and more complex amino acids are detected in this space. Suppose that life did originate in space, suppose it is there. We should be looking for elephants that are light years across. Forget the constellations, find the whole menagerie trampling through the universe, kicking over galaxies and burrowing under quasars.